The Ballad of Hattie Taylor Page 25

  Hattie was furious with Jake. For two days in a row, Jonathan Semp had missed school.

  Jonathan had changed since the first day of school. Regular meals and physical work had filled out his large, previously underfed frame, and he was now nearly as strapping as she’d suspected he would be.

  She knew Jake was responsible not only for issuing Jonathan clothes that fit properly but for seeing to the ranch cook supplying the boy with lunches to bring to school. She had nothing but admiration for the attention and care Jake had subtly bestowed upon the neglected teen. Jonathan’s size and his new confidence prevented him from becoming the butt of the other students’ jokes, and he had even forged a few friendships among the farm and ranch boys.

  But Jake had agreed with Hattie that schooling must come first, and now he was reneging.

  That evening, Hattie arrived at the ranch seething. Arrangements had been made some time ago for her, Nell, and Aunt Augusta to spend the weekend at the Murdock spread. It was one of the ranch’s many overworked periods, so Jake was too busy to come into town. The women planned to ready the gardens around the house for planting.

  Their visit was also designed to give Nell a glimpse at life on a working ranch, Hattie the opportunity to ride to her heart’s content, and Augusta some time with her son when he could snatch ten minutes here or grab a cup of coffee between chores there. Hattie had been looking forward to the visit for weeks, as there was nowhere else she’d rather be. Her anger over Jake’s cavalier disregard of their agreement, however, chafed the edges of her anticipation.

  Jake was occupied when they arrived. It wasn’t until supper was concluding that he finally joined them in the elegant dining room. He strode in still attired in his dusty work clothes, but freshly scrubbed and hair combed.

  “Ladies.” He grinned hospitably as he dropped into a chair and saluted them with a finger to his forehead. “I apologize for not being here to greet you when you arrived.”

  Hattie was ready to erupt by then, but she was proud of controlling her temper and taking part in the conversation during coffee and dessert. As they were leaving the dining room, however, she waylaid Jake. “I’d like to speak to you,” she said with cool crispness.

  “I’m all ears.” He grinned down at her attentively but sobered quickly when she returned his smile with hostile silence.

  “In your office,” she said flatly.

  Scratching his temple, he gave her a puzzled look. Then the look so promptly smoothed into something she couldn’t read, she could only conclude she had imagined the bafflement. He indicated that she should precede him down the hall.

  If she didn’t know better, Hattie would almost swear Jake was staring at her hips as she marched before him. Her skin temperature ratcheted up a couple of degrees. Waving the thought aside as bonehead mad, Hattie whirled to face him when the door closed behind them. He regarded her through narrowed eyes as he lounged back against the rich wood panels of the door. He looked so free and easy, while she . . .

  Well, she badly wanted to smack him. “You went back on our deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “You assured me Jonathan’s schoolwork would always come first,” she replied through clenched teeth. “Yet you have kept him out of school for two days!”

  “What?” His amusement vanished, and jerking upright, he pushed away from the door. “Wait here.” He strode from the room with Hattie on his heels. Striding straight out the front door and onto the porch, he hailed a passing cowhand. “Tell Semp to present himself in my office. Pronto!”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  Jake turned and noticed Hattie had followed him. “I told you to wait.”

  “Oh, you actually thought I was paying attention to your snapped orders?” She gave that absurdity the snort it deserved, then shrugged. “I’m not your lackey, Jake Murdock.”

  “Go wait in my office!” he commanded in a tone she seldom heard, and she whirled on her heel and stalked back to the office. Burrowed into the corner of the leather couch moments later, her arms crossed militantly over her breasts, she watched him through narrowed eyes as he took his seat behind the desk.

  Jake returned her look calmly. Without taking his eyes off her, he picked up a pencil and tapped its eraser end on the desktop. Sliding his fingers down its length, he lifted the pencil off the desk until gravity flipped it over and the lead point touched the smooth surface. Slid his fingers down its length again and kept repeating the motions with hypnotic regularity. All the while watching her.

  There was a tap on the door and Jake bid the caller to enter. Jonathan Semp stepped into the room. “You wanted to see me, Jake?”

  “I thought you told me you had Miss Taylor’s permission to miss school.”

  “Yeah. Uh . . .” A movement in his peripheral vision caught Jonathan’s eye and he turned his head. Heat burned up his neck when he saw his teacher sitting on the couch, tapping her foot and staring at him. “Uh . . . hi, Miss Taylor.” He swallowed hard. Oh boy. He was in for it now. He rushed to explain. “Jake needs my help, Miss Taylor. Y’see, it’s calvin’ season and—”

  “You want to keep working for me, boy?” Jake interrupted coldly.

  It was hard to swallow past the sudden constriction in his throat. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I would advise you not to lie. I told you when you started here school comes first, and I meant it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jonathan turned to Hattie. “I’m sorry, Miss Taylor.”

  “I want that in writing, Jonathan. One hundred times. You will write ‘I will not miss school and I will not lie.’ Have it on my desk first thing Monday morning. Understand?”

  “Yes’m.”

  Jake opened a desk drawer and pulled out several sheets of paper. He extended them to Jonathan and handed him a pencil. “Get started.”

  Face burning, Jonathan accepted the supplies and backed out of the room, leaving silence in his wake. Hattie had built up a full head of steam, and discovering she’d wrongly accused Jake only made her angrier. Ungraciously, she muttered, “I apologize for my erroneous assumption,” and stood up, nose elevated. “I promised Aunt Augusta I would play a few pieces on the piano. I better join her and Nell in the parlor.”

  Jake stood also. “That’s it?”

  “What’s it?”

  “I’m sorry for my erroneous assumption?” His mimicry of her sullen tone was right on target, and Hattie’s cheeks burned. “That’s it?”

  “I’ll write it out a hundred times.”

  He was around the desk in a flash. Towering over her, he gripped her elbows and drew her onto her toes until they were standing eyeball to eyeball. “Don’t get cute with me or I’ll—”

  “What?” Hattie wrenched free and backed up. Hopefully only she knew her heart was pounding to beat the band. “You’ll do what, Jacob? Smack my butt so hard I’ll be eating off the sideboard for a week?” It was a threat he’d used several times when she got out of line as a kid.

  His whole body jerked and his eyes darkened, the lids appearing suddenly weighted. “Is that what you’d like, Hattie?” he whispered hoarsely. “My hand on your bare butt?” He reached out and ran his hand over her hip, sliding it around to follow the curve of her buttock.

  Suddenly sinking his fingers into the resilient fullness beneath his hand, he pulled her forward until less than an inch separated them. He leaned over her, his face suddenly so close she felt his breath on her lips. “Because I’d be more than happy to oblige you, Big-eyes, if that’s what you’re angling for.”

  “Get your hands off me.” Hattie placed hers on his chest and shoved him away. Ignoring the wretchedly persistent, tickly feeling between her legs, she clenched her fists and stated coolly, “I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I am sorry I jumped to the wrong conclusion. If you don’t like my tone of voice, I’m sorry for that, too. But don’t go think
ing that entitles you to take liberties with me, Jacob Murdock. It doesn’t. Not with me or any other woman.” She whirled away in a red-hot fury and, reaching for the doorknob, wrenched the portal open. She stormed out, then slammed the office door closed behind her.

  A few moments later, Jake heard her taking out her temper on the exterior door as well.

  32

  Murdock Ranch

  LATE SATURDAY NIGHT, MAY 1, 1909

  The screen door squeaked softly as Jake pushed through to the front porch, then shut behind him with a quiet slap of wood on wood. The wicker chair he dropped onto creaked a protest. He barely registered the latter sound, he’d heard it so often. With a sigh of pleasure, he swung his stocking-clad feet atop the porch railing, making himself comfortable. Except for the usual nocturnal rustlings and calls of distant night creatures, the house and surrounding ranch were quiet. Just the way he liked it. Weary of wrestling his sheets, he’d come downstairs to see if a drink and a dose of the early spring night air might help him relax. His body was bone weary, but his brain was more awake than a kid before the county fair.

  He shouldn’t have grabbed Hattie that way yesterday. It was a tactical error. What was it about her stubborn anger and sassy mouth that made him lose all reason? He didn’t think of her as a little girl anymore. Hell, he hadn’t for a long time. So, when she’d thrown his old threat of a spanking in his face, it had been like waving a flag at a bull. He hadn’t even tried to resist the overpowering urge to demonstrate just how adult he considered her. Still, he couldn’t blame her for being angry. You don’t treat nice women like that. He had no excuse.

  But, damn. This timetable shit was a helluva lot harder than he’d figured it would be.

  When Hattie left Mattawa for school, Jake tried hard to put her out of his mind. It was all he could handle dealing with his grief over the deaths of Jane-Ellen and his baby. Disgracefully harder was the guilt clawing him for not being able to repudiate his rampant desire for Hattie. The same damn desire that laid waste to his control a mere two days after his wife’s death.

  But Hattie’s departure had left him hollow. And rather than diminishing, the pain of her furious leave-taking and her refusal to see, write, or talk to him had spread like cancer inside him. A situation not helped when he’d tried to see her at school on a trip to Seattle and the matron informed him it was against school policy to allow males to visit a student unless specified by the student’s parent or guardian. A list his name was not on.

  Not being able to see Hattie on that trip gutted him. It also made his guilt over her not coming home for holidays, or for so much as a visit since she’d left, worse than it had been before. He knew damn well Augusta, Mirabel, and Doc missed Hattie, too, and Jake didn’t doubt for a minute her absence was his fault. It didn’t seem to matter that he didn’t live in town. Evidently, Hattie had no intention of coming back to Mattawa as long as he was anywhere in the county.

  Guilt or no guilt, however, it didn’t erase the way Hattie had responded to him that night up in her room. No way in hell had he been able to forget the hot sensuality of her in his arms.

  He’d thought, given time, she would forgive whatever it was he’d done so wrong. But she hadn’t written him and she wouldn’t talk to him when she called. All news of her had come to him secondhand through the letters Hattie sent to his mother. And as the end of her schooling grew closer, he’d begun to feel desperate. What if she never came back at all? That was when he’d talked to Aurelia Donaldson. And in exchange for her help, he had made a promise.

  “Ideally, we try to hire male teachers,” the older woman had told him as they sat in her dimly illuminated, heavily furnished parlor. “Once a woman marries, she is, of course, disqualified from teaching. And in the past few years we’ve seen far too many of them come and go. Now, as you clearly know, the positions are available. But your request goes against every decision we’ve recently approved. You’re asking me to hire not one, but two young women.” She lowered her lorgnette and looked away with a sigh. “That’s going to be difficult to get past the rest of the board.”

  “You owe it to her.”

  Aurelia’s head snapped around and she raised her lorgnette to look down her nose at him in her most imperious manner. “Do I?”

  Jake met her gaze levelly. “Yes. The whole damn town does.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she conceded. “I’ve discovered she is an incredibly sweet child. I never gave her credit for that in the past. Her outspokenness and the way she ran around with the Marks boy led me to believe she was a hellion.”

  She looked around her large, elegant parlor. “I began to realize I may have misjudged her when Jane-Ellen died. Doc told me the lengths Hattie went to in order to make his daughter comfortable. And her letters have brightened this old woman’s life. She has an honesty that tickles me—she doesn’t give a fig about my money or the power I wield in Mattawa. Why, she actually wrote me a letter specifically to disagree with a decision about which I had written her. Her argument made sense, too.”

  Jake smiled wryly, knowing Aurelia had most likely first been offended, then been delighted by Hattie’s effrontery. But he sobered quickly. “Offering a position to her friend is the only option I can think of to guarantee having Hattie come home.”

  Aurelia’s face softened. “Yes. Her letters are full of Nell.”

  “If anyone can do it, you can,” he pressed.

  Her lorgnette had lowered, but Aurelia brought it up again to peer at him. “Why is it so important to you, Jacob?”

  Jake hesitated. Then he admitted with stark honesty, “Hattie’s special. You’re just beginning to realize it, but I’ve known it from the minute she first stepped off the train in ninety-nine.”

  He thrust his fingers through his hair. “I used to be special to her, too, Aurelia, but when she left here she was furious with me. I think I know why, but if it’s what I believe it is, it doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

  He shrugged, then admitted, “I can’t tolerate the way things between us stand much longer. She never writes to me, she doesn’t ask about me in her letters to Mother, and she’s refused to talk to me the few times she’s telephoned when I’ve been at Mother’s house. God only knows where she may accept an offer of employment. It could be anywhere in the state, and I will never know for certain what I did to make her cut me out of her life. I need the chance to know.”

  Aurelia looked at Jake sitting there, determined and ruthlessly honest as he stated his case. He was at ease in the stiff, formal ambiance of her home. He’d arrived unannounced in the parlor where few guests ever dared drop by uninvited, and she admired his boldness. She liked a person who knew what he wanted and was unafraid to go after it.

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll get it by the board. And I will do my best to ease her reemergence into Mattawa society. In return, I want your promise you will give me a year’s worth of work out of the girl before you go interfering in her life.”

  It had seemed a simple request to honor at the time.

  Jake became aware of his feet slowly turning into clumps of ice. The days had been lengthening and they’d enjoyed a few days in the high sixties. But when the sun went down, the temperature dropped a good twenty degrees and evenings quickly grew chilly. The night sky was clear and black, with stars thick, brilliant, and low overhead. Jake dropped his feet to the porch floor, threw back the remainder of his wine, and surged up out of his chair.

  He had his boots in his hand and was reaching for the screen door when he heard the jingle of a bridle. Rubbing one stockinged foot against his shin to restore a little warmth, he hesitated, listening hard. There! There it was again, and now he heard a quiet clip-clop of shod hooves as well. Stepping into a shadow, he searched the road for the source of the noise.

  Hell, it was Saturday night—no doubt one of his men was returning to the bunkhouse after a night at Bigger�
�s Saloon or Mamie’s cathouse. And yet—

  This had a feeling of stealth at odds with the habits of his men. Regard for others’ sleep wasn’t a general consideration when they were liquored up and racing up the road, anxious to grab a few hours’ shut-eye before having to roll out of bed again to start another workday.

  Jake used the marginally successful warming motion on his other foot. Whoever it was definitely seemed to want anonymity. The rider kept to the shadows and avoided the areas where starlight cast skeletal fingers of illumination. It wasn’t until the horse walked out of the lane and into the stable yard that Jake recognized it. And knowing the horse, he knew the rider.

  Anger rose in him like the creek during flooding season. Swearing beneath his breath, he yanked on his boots and vaulted the porch railing. He was across the yard seconds after the stable doors closed behind Hattie and her horse.

  Hattie hummed to herself as she loosened the cinch beneath Belle’s stomach. She didn’t remember the last time she’d felt so relaxed. After nights dreaming of racing her horse, she’d finally been in a position to do so. It had been everything she imagined it would be, too. Her nerves had settled and those nameless, relentless urges, which lately had increasingly plagued her—were gone. She felt wonderful.

  Until the door slammed open. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jake demanded.

  She’d been removing her saddle, but startled by Jake’s arrival, she lost her grip. The saddle tumbled to the stable floor, making Belle sidestep nervously. Hattie grabbed the reins and patted the mare’s glossy brown neck in reassurance. “Easy, girl,” she whispered. “Eeeeasy, now.” She looked over her shoulder at Jake. Clearly, from the tone and volume of his voice, he was furious. Seeing his face merely confirmed it. “Will you kindly lower your voice? You startled me to death and you’re upsetting Belle.”

  Muscles in Jake’s jaw jumped ominously. “Oh. Well,” he said through clenched teeth. “We mustn’t upset Belle.”

  She shrugged.